An original and profound exploration of contemplation from philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart.
 
In Lands of Likeness, Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.

"[An] arresting invitation to stop and see. Lands of Likeness . . . could not be more timely. For what it commends is nothing other than a way of being in the world that is neither grasping nor hurried, that is minutely attentive to the particularity of things rather than forever looking past them or behind or beneath, that constrains egoism in order to create space for the kinds of encounter that leave us transformed in their wake. It is a book that means to stop us in our tracks, permitting us to look, to linger, to wonder at what is. Or, as Hart rather touchingly writes, for all its theoretical sophistication and immense learning, Lands of Likeness is finally a book ‘about leaves and trees, birds and snails’." - Australian Book Review

"Hart's work has long been marked by a distinctive crossing of literary studies, philosophy, and theology — each of which is present in his latest book. Hart’s focus here is on the idea of contemplation, which he conceives of as a distinctive mode of mental life, a kind of thinking which is different both from argument and from the kind of discursive thinking typically connected to images and texts." - Church Times

"“Hart, the Anglo Australian poet, scholar and theologian, described by Harold Bloom as ‘one of the major living poets of the English language’. . . reveals, in this splendid new study, his wide and deep learning in the matter of the long history of contemplatio in Western thought and, especially, as expressed in English poetry. . . . Such a breadth of appreciation of literary culture as this has never been more urgently needed.”" - Quadrant